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Yep, you're looking at least a grand to have someone crack open a drive in a clean room. In general, for home users, it's simply not cost effective. However, most data is recoverable via software. That is worth a shot.

A friend of mine has a Macbook (white) and it crashed. She does not have a current backup available. I can't remember the name of the company that can recover data from her hard drive.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for her?

There are a lot of hard drive recovery services. All of them are expensive...but your friend's data may be worth it.

I also understand that the overwhelming majority of these places are what we call in the industry "box movers." They don't actually recover your data on-site; instead they send your drive to Seagate Recovery Services. But they do their best to make you think that they do their own recoveries.

I used to recommend Drive Savers (perhaps the oldest and best-known Mac hard drive recovery service), but their prices got outrageous, and they have become hard to get along with. They are only willing to recover the file types that you specifically agree to have recovered, and they refuse to recover any applications whatsoever.

Drive Rescue is not only a nice outfit to deal with, but their prices are very reasonable compared to the competition. (Not inexpensive, but usually a fraction of what someplace like Drive Savers would charge, for inferior service.)
Drive Rescue specializes in Macintoshes, and they use actual Macs to do the recovery.